Word: cambodias
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...Nixon had wanted to bring the soldiers home, he would have done so in 1968, when he promised, and would have taken much better care of their safety at the war's end. Instead, Kissinger left it up to the Vietnamese to force Laos and Cambodia to return American prisoners...
That rejoinder was not only frivolous but shallow. After the early '60s, one reason why the U.N. was unable to intervene in African and Asian bloodbaths was the sanctity-of-boundaries standard that Third World members held dear. Idi Amin's Uganda, Pol Pot's Cambodia and other killing fields piled up bones unchecked in large part because the carnage was performed within sovereign borders. Many developing countries were disturbed by these atrocities, but they remained loath to compromise the U.N. Charter's criterion for use of outside force; the days of "intervention" by Western colonial empires were too recent...
Several sparks finally ignited this mixture. As the civil war in neighboring Cambodia simmered down, the threat to Thailand from communist Vietnam, which long occupied Cambodia, also diminished. The army's aura as protector of the nation dimmed accordingly; Suchinda provoked only sardonic laughter last week by declaring that soldiers had fired into crowds in order to stop a threatened takeover by communist agitators. Despite their lessening prestige, however, the generals behaved in especially ham-handed fashion, flouting earlier pledges to restore democracy by ramming through a constitution that virtually institutionalized military control of the government -- and then having their...
...mail an odd package containing notebooks, scrambled manuscript pages and what appears to be the skeletal remains of a human finger. She assumes that all this has something to do with her friend Stephen Cox, a respected novelist who set off some two years earlier, hoping to get into Cambodia and gather material for a play about Pol Pot. And it is she who finally decides to go to Cambodia herself to find out whether Stephen is alive or dead...
...this case the first six months of 1988. And Drabble's rather disjointed panorama of diverse characters caught in the amber of time produces an eerily convincing sense of life in a technologically advanced society, of the horrors that are reported electronically -- say, from the killing fields of Cambodia -- and those that may erupt immediately down the street or in the next room...